What's so bad about forts?

[Benandorf]

And is there any reason you'd be worse off in a fort than a Castle in that sense?

[phonicsmonkey]

yes, a fort is much smaller than a castle with lower walls and no significant buildings, meaning you are far more exposed to artillery fire than if you were camped out in the main square of a castle

in fact a good tactic against large invading stacks (like Mongols or Timurids) is to tempt them by leaving a fort in their path, defended by one depleted bait unit, then attack them with an artillery-heavy stack the next turn once they have captured it and are sitting nicely inside.

[supadodo]

Which is why Kingdoms is gonna make forts much better...

Anyway, my only use of forts is to provide a staging ground for my army. As we all know, armies tend to go to the gray side every now and then for no apparent reason and forts help keep that from happening. You can essentially make a trail of forts across large provinces so your armies have a place to sleep in after a particularly long march.

[Rhedd]

Due to their cramped confines and total lack of defenses, they're no better (usually worse) than an open field battle.

The real clencher for me, though, is that unlike a field battle, you always count as being besieged, so if you lose, everyone dies.

No benefits plus insta-death if defeated equals a terrible place to fight.

I do construct them in chokepoints and man them with a few cheap archers. They work nicely for slowing and whittling down an invading enemy.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Forts across the Alps can keep you protected from the HRE, France, Hungary, and really slow down any of their attacks.

[tarbanrael]

forts are very useful as well for the Pyrenees to prevent the guys from the other side crossing over and drooling over your cities... It's particularly useful if you play Venice or Milan to seal off the Italian peninsula.

and as a cheat, it's brilliant to protect your merchants...

[Bob the Insane]

I used them a lot in RTW but not so much in M2TW...

I find it more effective to simply leave a decent sized army in a strategically sound position...

Where is can be benficial is guarding a group of bridges. Rather than having a large army on each. You have a fort with a single unit your side of each bridge and station a large army withing a single turn's move of all the forts.

While this may appear to give the bridge to the attacking unit, if you place you defending army next to the besieged fort and then attack from within the fort it counts as a sally battle and you fight on the fort square and not on the bridge. This also prevents the attacking army bringing reinforcements from the other side of the bridge...